By these words is declared the magnitude of the Ark according to all its dimensions — of length, breadth, and height; whence one may understand how great was the capacity of that Ark. The length of the Ark, then, was sextuple to the breadth, as 300 to 50, but decuple to the height, as 300 to 30 — which is, namely, the proportion among the dimensions of the human body. For the length of the body, from the crown to the soles of the feet, is six times as great as the breadth, which is from the right side to the left through the middle of the chest, and ten times as great as its height, which is the straight line measuring the depth of the chest of a man lying prone or supine. And lest these be thought drawn from my own opinion, I have followed the blessed Augustine as the author and leader of this view, writing thus in book 15 of The City of God, ch. 26: ‘The very measure of the length, breadth, and height of the Ark signifies the human body. For the length of the human body, from the crown to the footprints, has six times as much as the breadth, which is from one side to the other side, and ten times as much as the height, the measure of which height is from the back to the belly: as, if you measure a man lying supine or prone, he is six times as long from head to feet as he is broad from right to left, and ten times as long as he is high from the ground.’ Thus Augustine; who says the same in book 12 against Faustus, ch. 14. But because Moses defined the dimensions of the Ark in cubits, that the magnitude of the Ark may be understood, something must be said about the measure of the cubit.²

Many measures are in use drawn from the human body, such as are…³

…the finger, the palm, the foot, the cubit (cubitus or cubitum), the ell (ulna), the pace. Now the Pace is the space to which both hands are stretched, between the longest fingers of either hand; and this is the measure of the human body, equal to that which is from the crown to the soles of the feet. And the Pace consists of four cubits. The cubit, moreover, is the interval from the middle joint of the arm, or its bend, to the very tip of the middle finger — a foot and a half, that is, consisting of one foot and a half. The ell, on the authority of Pollux and Hesychius, is the same as the cubit — although Servius, on those words of Virgil, ‘Tell in what lands (and thou shalt be to me great Apollo) the space of the sky lies open no more than three ells,’ makes the ell equal to the pace. In Ovid, however, in the seventh book of the Metamorphoses, and in Pliny, book 16, ch. 40, the ell is put for the whole limb comprising the arm, the forearm, and the hand; but (as we said above) the common sense and use of men [makes it equal to the cubit]. The foot consists of four palms; the palm, of four transverse fingers. Therefore the cubit, in common use, is a foot and a half, and consists of six palms. About these measures Vitruvius and others [have written], but of all men most subtly and most diligently has Agricola discoursed.⁴

I would not, for my part, deny that these measures were anciently larger than they now are, as the human body itself too was; but to what extent they have decreased is uncertain. Among the Hebrews there is said to have been a twofold kind of cubit: the one common and ordinary, of a foot and a half, as has been defined; the other, which in Ezekiel, ch. 43, is called the ‘truest and perfect’ cubit, greater than the common by one palm, and therefore named by some the ‘palm-cubit’; from which cubit the Royal cubit was but little distant, greater than the common and ordinary by three fingers, which Herodotus mentions in his first book.⁵

There is named, moreover, in the sacred writings, the ‘manly cubit,’ or the ‘cubit of a man’s hand.’ For in the third chapter of Deuteronomy, about Og the giant, king of Bashan, it is written thus: ‘Og alone, king of Bashan, remained of the stock of the giants. His iron bed is shown, which is in Rabbath of the children of Ammon, having nine cubits in length and four in breadth, according to the measure of the cubit of a man’s hand’ (or, as the Septuagint translators have it, word for word from the Hebrew, ‘in the cubit of a man’). And it is called the ‘manly cubit’ which is of a just and perfect measure; for such is the cubit of a man — that is, of a man perfect alike in age and in stature — for the cubit of a boy or of some little fellow is far less. And although the measure of the cubit was drawn from the arm of a man (from whose bend to the very tip of the middle finger, when it is extended, it is called a ‘cubit’), nevertheless, because, with the variety of men’s stature, the magnitude of the human cubit also varies, while a measure which is applied for measuring things must necessarily be fixed and uniform, it therefore came about that the measure of a cubit, made of wood, metal, or other material and adapted to the magnitude of the manly cubit (that is…⁶

…the perfect [cubit]), should be kept publicly and applied for measuring things, that no fraud might lie hidden beneath.⁷

But it is fitting to know that in that passage of Deuteronomy, for what we have, ‘according to the measure of the cubit of a man’s hand,’ the Chaldee paraphrast rendered thus, ‘according to the king’s cubit’; which some think is to be referred to King Og himself, so that it is signified that his bed had not the length and breadth of a common cubit, but according to the measure of the cubit of that same king, who, as in the rest of his body, so also in his cubit, exceeded other men. And this the author of the Complutensian edition followed; for he has, ‘in the cubit of the same king.’ Although there are some who think that the ‘royal cubit’ is so called for that which is ‘public’ — just as a road is called ‘royal,’ that is, public — so that Moses meant to signify the public cubit, which, by the decree of the King or Magistrate, has the perfect and invariable measure of a cubit.⁸

The capacity, then, of the whole Ark, which within those three dimensions contained the whole empty space of the Ark — all the obstructions of the columns being subtracted, and the thickness too of the stories and the planking distinguishing the nests and storerooms — is by geometrical reckoning concluded to have been four hundred and fifty thousand cubits; which magnitude amply sufficed for taking in and containing all those things which Moses relates were within the ark. For if you multiply, by geometrical reckoning, the length of three hundred cubits into the fifty cubits of breadth, there result fifteen thousand square cubits; multiplying this sum again into the thirty cubits of height, there result four hundred and fifty thousand solid cubits; and this is the interior empty space of the ark and its capacity. But if Moses spoke of cubits not common but perfect and truest, as he called them in Ezekiel ch. 43 (which are greater by a palm than the common and ordinary cubits), the magnitude of the Ark must necessarily have been far greater. For, the reckoning being made, by adding to each of the common cubits one palm, we shall find that the length of the Ark was three hundred and fifty cubits, the breadth fifty-eight cubits and two palms, and the height thirty-five cubits.⁹

This too must be observed, which the blessed Augustine mentions in book 15 of The City of God, ch. 27: that the length and breadth of the Ark are multiplied as many times as the floors or stories were multiplied which were made for the different habitations in the Ark; and because these, according to Augustine, were trebled, he therefore said that, as regards habitation, the Ark was of nine hundred cubits in length, a hundred and fifty in breadth, ninety in height. But with the height it is otherwise than with the length and breadth; for the height, because of the multiplication of the storeys, is not multiplied, but rather, on the contrary, diminished and used up.¹⁰